- “Social services worked from home while children they supervised were murdered” – A review finds “fragmented” oversight of individual cases, such as Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, who were abused throughout lockdown, the Telegraph reports.
- “A leaving do is ‘work’ but a birthday party isn’t: Met chief explains how Boris Johnson wriggled off the hook” – Sir Stephen House tries to clarify reasoning behind partygate fines that were issued – and those that weren’t – for Downing Street gatherings, the Telegraph reports.
- “We’ll all pay the price for Rishi Sunak’s handouts” – Matthew Lynn nails the problem in the Spectator: “The harsh reality about the current bout of inflation is this: we locked down much of the global economy for a year, and printed money to pay for it. On top of that the Ukraine war has taken out a huge chunk of productive capacity as well. The result? We are poorer than we were.”
- “Is this what ‘success’ looks like?” – Could it be that Australia’s Covid story has morphed into a pandemic of the vaccinated, asks Ramesh Thakur in Spectator Australia.
- “Never mind the rest – ‘Partygate’ report shows No.10 didn’t see Covid as a risk” – As one official put it at the time, “we seem to have got away with” it. “You know what, I think the bugger might just be right,” says Michael Curzon in Bournbrook.
- “Schools Are Reinstating Mask Mandates as COVID-19 Cases Rise” – School districts in Philadelphia, Providence, R.I., and Brookline, Mass., are requiring students and staff to wear masks again – though they are the exception, rather than the rule, says Time.
- “The natural Cavalier Boris Johnson forgot Covid cast him in the role of a Roundhead – and I fear he’ll never recover” – Stephen Glover in the Mail has Boris pegged: “Boris was neither offended by the partying in No. 10, nor likely to be upset by the mess. The natural Cavalier forgot that the pandemic had cast him in the role of a Roundhead, solemnly announcing coercive rules on television which – to put it mildly – he didn’t zealously enforce on his home patch.”
- “Sue Gray report finds ‘no evidence’ Cummings voiced Partygate fears” – Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser claimed in January that he had warned in an email about a party being against the Covid rules – but the report could not find the email, according to the Mail.
- “Scientists say lockdowns make public get ‘pandemic fatigue’ quicker” – Italian scientists have used mobile phone data gathered from 20 of Italy’s regions in the pandemic to show pandemic fatigue grew faster during the harshest lockdowns, according to the Mail.
- “Long Covid risk falls only slightly after vaccination, huge study shows” – Results suggest that vaccines offer less protection against lingering symptoms than expected, Nature reports.
- “The Mystery of Monkeypox’s Global Spread” – Initial genomic sequencing suggests the virus hasn’t mutated to become more transmissible. So what explains its unprecedented rise across the world, asks David Cox in Wired.
- “Pet hamsters belonging to monkeypox patients should be isolated or killed, say health chiefs” – Fears grow that the virus could become endemic across Europe if it makes the jump to animals, according to the Telegraph, as the hysteria builds.
- “2,200 prominent Spanish personalities investigated for false COVID-19 vaccination” – The ‘Jenner Operation’ has uncovered at least 2,200 famous people with false COVID-19 vaccination certificates after these were bought from a nurse, reports EuroWeekly News.
- “Are sanctions making Russia richer?” – Putin may be struggling in the military war, but he doesn’t seem to be losing the economic one, says Wolfgang Münchau in the Spectator.
- “Ukraine war: World Bank boss warns over global recession” – David Malpass also said coronavirus lockdowns in China are contributing to a global slowdown, reports BBC News.
- “How will the war in Ukraine end? It won’t” – Neither side can afford to take any off-ramp offered to them now, argues Gabriel Gavin in UnHerd.
- “BP to review all North Sea investment in light of windfall tax” – BP is the first major energy company to declare it would review investments in light of the Government’s new windfall tax, reports the Telegraph.
- “Cowardly corporations have been captured by a form of group-think” – Suspending an HSBC executive for comments about climate change is an unjust response to pressure group criticism, says the Telegraph in a leading article.
- “Are babies racist now?” – Not even infants are safe from accusations of ‘unconscious bias’, says Frank Furedi in Spiked.
- “Which black lives matter?” – We’ve learned nothing since George Floyd’s death, says Peter Van Buren in the Spectator.
- “Britain’s Online Safety Bill could change the face of the internet” – Tech firms will be incentivised to censor their users en masse, says the Economist.
- “Companies Flunk Free Speech” – Although respecting diverse viewpoints is good for business, companies register a dismal performance on a gauge of their tolerance of ideological diversity, write Jeremy Tedesco and Robert Netzly in the Wall St. Journal.
- “Princeton University disgraced itself by firing free speech hero Joshua Katz” – Regardless of the legal outcome, Professor Katz can take comfort in Princeton’s grotesque myopia, argues Paul du Quenoy in Newsweek.
- “Ricky Gervais has broken the spell of wokeness” – The trans ideology cannot survive mockery or scrutiny, says Fraser Myers in Spiked.
- “Young, gifted and not black enough for the C of E” – Harry Miller on the shoddy treatment of Calvin Robinson in TCW Defending Freedom.
- “Worrying truth of what children are really learning in Sex Education: Many schools have handed over their classes to unregulated groups pushing a ‘woke’ agenda” – Many parents are sharing concerns about the content of lessons and the increasingly fevered environment in schools surrounding these topics, reports the Mail.
- “This bill is essentially handing a loaded gun to the enemies of every Conservative in the land” – Watch: Toby discusses the Online Safety Bill with Mark Steyn on GB News.
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